What you see on your timeline at the time you sign up is indexed right away. After that, the app gets all your tweets and those from who you follow.
As twitter has an hourly limit for API calls, it may take some time to index your friends history.
It depends on how many friends you have and how much they tweet
It took me about 3 days to build it. It's my first ruby / heroku app, so I learned a lot. Sinitter (http://sinitter.moocode.com/) saved me a lot of coding, though.
I'm fetching your timeline, you friends timelines, and indexing them with IndexTank.
It's incremental, so it may take a while. There's a limited number of allowed twitter API calls per hour, so in case you have lots of friends it'll take some time to have them all indexed.
About the status, there's a status bar on the upper right corner.
Still, it is kind of a hack.